>At 8:38 AM +1000 19/5/03, cooee wrote:
>>The Language Police, by Diane Ravitch, previewed by Salon.com 16 May, says
>>in the US nowadays books for the young have 'no "heroines,' owls, birthdays
>>or pumpkins - they might offend somebody'...
>
>Tell that to those Harry Potter readers! It's all birthdays,
>pumpkins and at least one heroine -
Of course, you're right Alison, but in many parts of the US, there has been
a rather concerted attempt to remove harry potter from libraries etc,
because it is 'unChristian' etc. WHich is partly what that Ravitch book is
all about... the desire to 'protect' young readers from...whatever...
Doug
who was away for a couple of days at a wonderful conference celebrating the
work & mentoriship of poet Fred Wah & also the mentorship of Pauline
Butling (in Calgary), where papers were given, & many poems read
(wondrously), & then I came back to 171 e-mails, of which about half either
offered me Viagra or wanted to enlarge my penis!
Douglas Barbour
Department of English
University of Alberta
Edmonton Alberta Canada T6G 2E5
(h) [780] 436 3320 (b) [780] 492 0521
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/dbhome.htm
Violence can only be concealed by a lie,
and the lie can only be maintained by violence.
Any man who has once proclaimed violence as his method
is inevitably forced to take the lie as his principle.
Alexander Solzhenitzyn
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